Microsoft brings its DTrace debugger to Windows

Users can filter on conditions or errors, write code to look at lock patterns, and detect deadlocks

Microsoft has released the first Windows version of DTrace, its Linux debugging tool, for 64-bit Windows 10 beta builds. Microsoft has its own ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) tool, but said ETW is static and does not allow for programmatically inserting trace points at runtime.

DTrace on Windows is in the OpenDTrace project on GitHub. OpenDTrace began in 2016 as an effort to produce a portable implementation of DTrace for multiple operating systems. During the next few months, Microsoft plans to work with the OpenDTrace community to merge changes.

DTrace serves as a dynamic tracing framework for administrators or developers to get a real-time view into a system either in kernel or user mode. It has a C-style language for dynamically inserting trace points. Users can filter on conditions or errors, write code to look at lock patterns, and detect deadlocks.

You can download DTrace on Windows from GitHub. To run DTrace on Windows, developers need Windows 10 beta (Insider) build 18342 or higher.

This story, "Microsoft brings its DTrace debugger to Windows" was originally published by
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